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This paper deals with finding economic order quantity, number of orders to be placed and/or the time to place each order for four different special types of problems that may be encountered in practice. The first problem (Problem 1a) assumes a fixed planning horizon and a perishable product such as Christmas trees or fashion merchandise whose value deteriorates as the item gets aged. Under constant demand assumption, solution for this type of problem is worked out by capturing the deterioration in value by increasing holding cost. The second problem (Problem 2) has the same assumption as the first, except that the demand is assumed to increase as we move forward in time. The third problem (Problem 2a) is a restricted version of the second, which allows a specific number of integer orders during the planning horizon. The fourth problem (Problem 3) allows the ordering cost to increase as time progresses. All formulae derived can be easily applied to find numerical answers. The answers may have to be adjusted to reflect container size, minimum order quantity and any other restriction not modeled, or to take into account any violation of the model assumptions.

This study aims to identify service quality dimensions for logistics service providers (LSPs) and to examine their relationships with customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Service quality dimensions are identified from vast literature review. Customers who take services from LSPs were surveyed to collect data on basis of developed survey instrument. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is applied to test the proposed research hypotheses.

The study shows that all the five service quality constructs, i.e. “Operational Quality”, “Resource Quality”, “Information Quality”, “Personnel Contact Quality” and “Customization and Innovation Quality” have direct relationship with customer satisfaction. They also have indirect relationship with customer loyalty, implying the full mediation of customer satisfaction.

The results of the study suggest that the logistics service quality (LSQ) can be measured multi-dimensionally. It provides clear implications to LSPs for improvement of service quality. The present research work is expected to be useful for both, logistics service providers and the customer organizations, which take services from LSPs. LSPs can develop strategies to improve their service quality on basis of findings from this study.

The present research will help in extending the existing literature on service quality in context to LSPs.

Women empowerment becomes an important policy discussion in development economics and modernization theory. The empowerment of women can lead to an increase in the quality viz-a-viz the capacity of human resources accessible for economic development. The purpose of this study is to evidence the impact of social and economic dimensions on women empowerment through financial inclusion in rural India.

To reveal the research objective, the study has utilized a primary survey of women respondents from the Gujarat state of India by a simple random sampling method and applied a logistic regression approach to identify the relationship between the need of a bank account (determinant of financial inclusion) as a dependent variable and social and economic dimensions of women empowerment such as earning status, participation in financial decision-making, recipient of social welfare schemes and perception towards the safety of saving as independent variables.

The results of this study show that earning status, participation in financial decision-making at household level and recipient of social welfare schemes by women have a significant impact on women empowerment through financial inclusion; however, safety of their savings is observed as an insignificant variable, yet the odd value is very high (2.437) in the present study.

The present study is the first of its kind to examine the social and economic status of women and its impact on their requirement of a formal bank account for the overall empowerment of women in rural India.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimized setting of wire-cut electrical discharge machining (WEDM) parameters at which material removal rate (MRR) and mean roughness depth (Rz) set a compromise. The problem in the processing of Ti-6Al-4V by conventional processes is a high strength, high hardness, high tool wear. Due to which WEDM is adopted to machine Ti-6Al-4V biomedical alloy. Ti-6Al-4V alloy has a number of applications in the engineering and medical industries due to its high strength biocompatibility.

The effect of control factors (i.e. pulse on-time: Pon; pulse off-time: Poff; servo voltage: SV) on the MRR and Rz is investigated in the present research. The planning of experiments is done using a Taguchi-based L9 orthogonal array. The percentage influence of each factor on responses is also evaluated. The multi-objective optimization is done using the grey approach initially. After that, the results were also calculated using harmony search (HS). Therefore, a hybrid approach of grey and HS is used to find the optimized values of MRR and Rz.

The maximum value of grade calculated by grey-HS is 0.7879, while in the case of the experimental run the maximum value of grey grade is 0.7239. The optimized setting after improvisation at this grade value is Pon: 130 µs; Poff: 45 µs and SV: 70 V for MRR and Rz collectively. The validation of the suggested setting is completed by experimentation. The values of MRR and Rz are coming out to be 6.4 mm³/min and 13.84 µm, which represents improvised results after the implementation of the HS algorithm.

The integration of the grey approach with the HS principle in the manufacturing domain is yet to be explored. Therefore, in the present research hybrid approach of grey-HS is implemented in the manufacturing domain having applications in medical industries.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the sintering temperature on the microstructural, mechanical and physical properties of Cu-SiC composites.

The powder metallurgy route was used to fabricate the samples. Cold compaction of powders was conducted at 250 MPa which was followed by sintering at 850°C–950°C at the interval of 50 °C in the open atmospheric furnace. SiC was used as a reinforcement and the volumetric fraction of the SiC was varied as 10%, 15% and 20%. The processed samples were metallurgically characterized by the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Mechanical characterization was done using tensile and Vickers’ micro-hardness testing to check the hardness and strength of the samples. Archimedes principle and Four-point collinear probe method were used to measure the density and electrical resistivity of the samples.

SEM micrograph reveals the uniform dispersion of the SiC particles in the Cu matrix element. The results revealed that the Hardness and tensile strength were improved due to the addition of SiC and were maximum for the samples sintered at 950 °C. The addition of SiC has also increased the electrical resistivity of the Cu-SiC composite and was lowest for Cu 100% while the relative density has shown the reverse trend. Further, it was found that the maximum hardness of 91.67 Hv and ultimate tensile strength of 312.93 MPa were found for Cu-20% SiC composite and the lowest electrical resistivity of 2.017 µ- Ω-cm was found for pure Cu sample sintered at 950 °C, and this temperature was concluded as the optimum sintering temperature.

The powder metallurgy route for the fabrication of the composites is a challenging task as the trapping of oxygen cannot be controlled during the compaction process as well as during the sintering process. So, a more intensive study is required to overcome these kinds of limitations.

As of the author’s best knowledge, no work has been reported on the effect of sintering temperature on the properties of the Cu-SiC composites which has huge potential in the industries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors influencing the citizens of India to prevent cybercrimes in the proposed Smart Cities of India.

A conceptual model has been developed for identifying factors preventing cybercrimes. The conceptual model was validated empirically with a sample size of 315 participants from India. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with SPSS and AMOS softwares.

The study reveals that the “awareness of cybercrimes” significantly influences the actual usage of technology to prevent cybercrimes in Smart Cities of India. The study reveals that government initiative (GI) and legal awareness are less influential in spreading of the awareness of cybercrimes (AOC) to the citizens of the proposed smart cities.

The conceptual model utilizes two constructs from the technology adoption model, namely, perceived usefulness and ease of use. The study employs other factors such as social media, word of mouth, GIs, legal awareness and organizations constituting entities spreading awareness from different related literature works. Thereby, a comprehensive theoretical conceptual model has been proposed which helps to identify the factors that may help in preventing cybercrimes.

This study provides an insight to the policy maker to understand several factors influencing the AOC of the citizens of the proposed Smart Cities of India for the prevention of cybercrimes.

There are few existing studies analyzing the effect of AOC to mitigate cybercrimes. Thus, this study offers a novel contribution.

This study aims to examine the research pattern and growth trends of published research on a unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) from 2012 to 2019. The study also examines the research scope of UTAUT2 for future researchers.

This study has adopted a bibliometric approach followed by a structured literature review analysis to synthesize the research on UTAUT2 since 2012. In total, 163 documents were analyzed for type of studies, theories and frameworks, methodologies, author wise collaboration, organizations that contributed to the body of knowledge in the UTAUT2 research and journals that published studies in this domain. VOSviewer and Tableau were used for the data visualization, whereas TCCM, which means theory (T), context (C), characteristics (C) and methodology (M) framework is used to propose the future research directions.

The findings reveal research on UTAUT2 is growing. The structured literature analysis of the top 15 cited articles further analyzed the parsimony of new models in detail. In addition, the study highlights the inception by and promoters of UTAUT2 in a separate section. The data for this study was collected by searching the title, abstract and keywords of documents in the Scopus database.

This study is based on research papers, published in the UTAUT2 research area, that have been extracted from the Scopus database by keywords only. Future studies can also perform a meta-analysis of various clusters generated by bibliometric analysis.

This study is useful for practitioners to devise strategies for increasing technology acceptance, adoption and utilization in the times to come.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the very few and early studies, which examined patterns and growth trends of the UTAUT2 studies with the TCCM framework, to suggest scope for future research studies.

Consumers have the multiple options to choose their products and services, which have a significant impact on the pattern of consumer decision making in digital market and further increases the challenges for the service providers to predict their buying pattern. In this sense, the purpose of this paper is to propose a structural hierarchy model for analyzing the changing pattern of consumer decision making in digital market by taking an Indian context.

To accomplish the objectives, the research is conducted in two phases. An extensive literature review is performed in the first phase to list the factors related to the changing pattern of consumer decision making in digital market and then fuzzy Delphi method is applied to finalize the factors. In the second phase, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is employed to find the priority weights of finalized factors. The fuzzy set theory allows capturing the vagueness in the data.

The findings obtained in this study shows that consumers are much conscious about innovative and trendy products as well as brand and quality; therefore, the service providers must think about these two most important factors so that they can able to retain their consumer in their online portal.

The analysis shows that “innovative and trendy” is the first priority factor for the consumers followed by “brand and quality” and “fulfilment and time energy.” The proposed model can help the marketers and service providers in predicting customers’ preferences and their changing pattern efficiently under vague surroundings. The outcomes of this research work not only help the service provider to update their products and services according to consumers’ needs but can also help them to increase profit and minimize their risk.

This work contributes to consumer research literature focusing on problem evaluation in the context of changing pattern of consumer decision making in digital era.

The purpose of this paper is to explore use of community treatment orders (CTOs) in adults with intellectual disability (ID) and mental health problems across England and Wales.

A web-based exploratory survey was sent to 359 consultants on the database of the Faculty of the Psychiatry of ID, Royal College of Psychiatrists who had declared ID as their main speciality. Socio-demographic details of responding consultants, clinical characteristics of adults with ID on CTO, subjective views of consultants on using CTOs in people with ID were collected and analysed.

In total, 94 consultant questionnaires were returned providing information on 115 patients detained under CTO. More than 75 per cent of the respondents had used CTO in their clinical practice. Patients subject to CTO were generally young, white males with mild ID and living in supported accommodation. CTOs were primarily used in situations of non-engagement (52.2 per cent), non-compliance with medication (47 per cent) or non-compliance with social care supports (49.6 per cent).

Responding consultants expressed concerns about encroachment of civil liberties and ethics of using CTOs in people with ID who may lack capacity and stressed that decision to use CTOs needs to be therefore done on individual basis.

This is the first national study to examine the practice of applying CTOs in adults with ID and mental disorders. Current practice is based on evidence from research done in adults with normal intelligence. Further research is needed to investigate the utility of CTOs in routine clinical practice in adults with ID and mental disorders.

Transforming a production-oriented firm into a marketing-oriented firm; aligning marketing strategy of local companies in globalizing emerging markets; creating sustainable competitive advantage.

Post graduate management courses in marketing management, strategic marketing, international marketing, business strategy.

This case is about how the leader in the Indian paper industry, Ballarpur Industries Ltd (BILT), is proactively transforming a production-oriented firm to a marketing-oriented firm to compete in the globalizing emerging market scenario, in the wake of economic liberalisation. It requires the participants to evaluate the impact of marketing initiatives made, and align BILT's marketing strategy to leverage it's strengths and help create sustainable competitive advantage.

To understand the need for local companies in emerging markets to proactively align marketing strategy to build competitive advantage in the globalizing industry.

Teaching notes.